Mel | IVF, emergency caesarean, postpartum anxiety and depression, mother and baby unit stay

“I met my partner Tom when I was thirty five. I’d been single for about ten years by that point and I’d actually started looking into egg freezing because I thought there was a real chance I wasn’t going to meet someone at all, or at a time when my fertility was in a good place. Tom is ten years younger than me so that felt like another hurdle, but when I brought it up with him he said having kids wasn’t off the table for him at all.

“We started trying when I was thirty eight and it wasn’t an easy journey. We only actually tried for about six months before I said let’s go to the doctor and get everything checked. It came back as unexplained infertility, which was almost worse in a way. My cycles were regular, everything came back fine, there was no box to tick that told us what to fix.

“We were living in a remote community in the Northern Territory at the time because of Tom’s work, and we came back to Sydney for my sister’s wedding. I said let’s just go straight to IVF because we’re only here for a month. We got eight eggs, six fertilised, and then it was the worst wait ever, waiting to hear how many made it to the blastocyst stage. In the end we had four, and because we happened to be in Sydney they offered us a fresh transfer. I genuinely didn’t think it would work, I thought this round was just to freeze some embryos for later, so I drank at my sister’s wedding two days before the transfer thinking there was no harm in it.

“When I did the test I looked at it and thought, is that a line, and then I woke Tom up and said it’s worked. He didn’t believe me. We hadn’t mentally prepared at all because we were so convinced it wouldn’t happen straight away.

“What followed was a first trimester unlike anything most people go through. I drove five days back to the community on my own with our dog while Tom flew back for work, and I was doing blood tests in a small town where the samples had to be sent off to Brisbane to be processed, so what should have taken a day or two took the best part of a week. I had spotting on that drive and had no way of getting hold of my fertility doctor, it was terrifying. It turned out it was likely just irritation from the progesterone suppositories but you don’t know that at the time.

“The nausea when it came was brutal, made so much worse by the heat. By October it was hitting forty degrees some days and I just couldn’t cope with it the way people who’d grown up there could. I was living on baked potato and yoghurt and I remember thinking about all the women who have to go to work through that first trimester pretending they’re fine, it’s such a hard, invisible thing to carry.

“I got to the end of my first trimester and told Tom I needed to go home early. I needed to be out of the heat and near my family. The relief was huge when we finally saw the six week scan and there was a heartbeat, but even then you’re straight back to worrying about the next milestone.

“Coming back to Sydney had its own chaos. I’d been referred through my fertility clinic rather than a GP so I had no idea who my actual care provider was meant to be. The rental market had gone mad while we were away and we didn’t find a place until I was thirty six weeks pregnant. I also missed out on Midwifery Group Practice because of a paperwork mix up and ended up in the MAP program instead, which meant I wouldn’t necessarily know the midwife at my birth. That worried me a lot, I think I’d built up this idea in my head of getting a burnt out, gruff midwife who wouldn’t advocate for me.

“Because we didn’t have much money we ended up hiring a student doula, Siobhan, through a placement program for a few hundred dollars rather than the several thousand a fully qualified doula would have cost. She was exactly what we needed, warm but practical, and she stayed with us the whole way through.

“At thirty nine weeks and four days my waters broke at home in the middle of the night. We drove to the hospital with our anxious dog still in the back seat because we knew he’d howl the house down if we left him. When they checked the fluid they found meconium, which meant I had to stay in for monitoring rather than labouring at home as I’d planned.

“My contractions were getting more intense and the midwives noticed his heart rate dipping each time. They wanted to put in a fetal scalp electrode to monitor him properly, which was something I’d been completely against before labour, but in that moment I wanted it because I needed to know if he was in distress. I had an epidural too, which I loved honestly, it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

“His heart rate kept dipping and I got to the point where I said I want a caesarean. I had to push for it a bit because they were keen for me to keep going, but I’d made a decision in myself that if things weren’t progressing and his heart rate wasn’t settling, I wanted him out rather than getting to a really difficult point further down the line.

“What I hadn’t done was any research into what a caesarean actually involves. I’d spent so much time preparing for a vaginal birth that it hadn’t occurred to me this was major surgery and that I’d be fully awake for it. As they topped up the epidural and I lost feeling in my legs I had a panic attack. I have an anxiety disorder and it had been well managed for years, but lying there unable to move my body sent me straight into it. I was begging them to put me under.

“They gave me a sedative instead, which calmed me enough to get through it, though I think I disassociated a bit through most of the procedure. Halfway through prep they checked my dilation out of curiosity and found I was fully dilated, ten centimetres, entirely on my own, no syntocinon needed. They asked if I wanted to try for a vaginal birth after all and I just said no, we’re doing this now, I’ve come this far.

“When Joey was born and put on my chest I remember faking my reaction. He was screaming right in my face and I just felt completely overwhelmed. I asked Tom to take him because I was still on the table and needed to process what had just happened to my body.

“That disconnect didn’t go away straight after. It felt like someone had dropped a baby on my doorstep rather than handed me my own child. I loved him biologically, I wanted him fed and safe, but there was no rush of love, and I felt like I had to pretend in front of family that I was completely obsessed with him.

“By day three the baby blues hit hard and it kept getting worse rather than better. I was having intrusive thoughts, really struggling to function, and eventually called the national mental health helpline. Within a day two people came to our house, and from there I was referred to the perinatal and infant mental health service and admitted, voluntarily, to a mother and baby unit for two weeks.

“I felt so ashamed going in, like I’d failed at becoming a mum, even though I know now that’s not true at all. The care there was extraordinary, psychiatrists, psychologists, midwives and child health nurses all working with me rather than at me, adjusting my medication gently, teaching us how to bath him and settle him in the evenings. I made friends in there for life.

“Coming home was scary because you get used to that bubble, but by then things had turned a corner. Now I am completely in love with him. We put him to bed and then lie there looking at photos and videos of him because we miss him within minutes. If you’d told me during the worst of it that this is where we’d end up, I wouldn’t have believed you.

“If I could go back I’d have learned about what a caesarean actually involves rather than only preparing for a vaginal birth, and I’d have sought help for how I was feeling sooner. It doesn’t have to look like this for everyone, but if it does, it’s okay, things really can turn around.”